Penny Loaves and Butter Cheap: Britain In 1846 by Bates Stephen;

Author:Bates, Stephen; [Bates, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, J.M.W. Turner’s painting of a steam-engine pulling a train of open carriages full of people across Maidenhead Bridge in a hazy miasma, was the great artist’s last major work: appropriately enough since its symbolism was all concerned with the headlong onwards rush of modernity and industrialization, coming on at a speed and with a clatter that man had never before achieved. Turner had apparently got the idea during a train journey from Bristol to London in 1843 and astonished his fellow passengers who watched as the elderly gentleman stuck his head out of the window into a drenching maelstrom of rain and smoke. The canvas is thick with swathes of blue, grey and white paint, daubed on in thick chunks with a palette knife, so that the only sure outline in the painting is the black engine with its tall chimney and its red tongue of flame, bearing down fast out of the picture. All the rest is faint and dream-like, dissolving in the mist of steam and damp. In the haze far below there is a tiny man fishing on a boat under an umbrella, on the distant bank a crowd waves, and to the right, again far off, a ploughman appears to be pushing his old technology backwards: all images so indistinct as to be easily missed. Similarly, on the bridge in front of the train, a rabbit or hare seems to be running to escape, though it is scarcely more than a smudge of brown paint. It is a painting of the future, decades ahead of its time, and when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844, it left the critics awed, but baffled. ‘Whether Turner’s pictures are dazzling unrealities or whether they are realities seized upon at a moment’s glance, we leave his detractors and admirers to settle between them,’ wrote The Times.32

By now the old artist was into his seventies. In 1845 he made his last trip to the Continent and was sufficiently eminent to be invited to dine with the French king Louis Philippe, but in the autumn of 1846 he would make his final home near the Thames in Chelsea with his last mistress Sophia Booth, who also kept the boarding house where he stayed at Margate every year. In Davis Place, overlooking the river just off Cheyne Row, a stone’s throw from where the Carlyles and other literary folk lived, the couple were known as Mr and Mrs Booth, though the paint in Turner’s hair and on his fingers probably gave his identity away when he visited the local pubs for a sherry or a bottle of gin, or had his hair cut at the local barber’s. Sophia also gave the game away with her insistence that the elderly gent was a great man. Descriptions of him in those days, on his appearances at the Royal Academy on varnishing days before the summer exhibition, speak of him with awe as a

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